John Sweeney

I found the article 5 reasons why Marketing Automation marks the end of the VP Marketing EMEA in software by John Watton of Shipserv really relevant to my work. I consider it a call to arms for B2B tech marketers in EMEA and echos many of the sentiments in the B2B Marketing Manfesto from Velocity Partners

Here are my thoughts on John’s views. Whilst I can see the trend you see longterm EMEA marketers still have a role to play in adapting US centric marketing automation so that it works in Europe. It’s not always possible to assume what worked in the US will work in EMEA.(I’m thinking more of the major non-English speaking markets rather than the UK.).

Tech companies also segment the US market more deeply and have the sales specialists to support that. European markets being smaller and with different languages and less specialist sales people need a different approach.

Savvy Europeans can also build better programmes learning from the experiences (and mistakes) made by US colleagues.

Devising demand generation activities across France/Germany/UK/Spain is always going to be a stretch for someone without European experience. My experience of Marketing Automation is that the execution teams need to be increasingly global.

Those at the forefront are also learning on the need to ‘tweak’
things like lead-scoring according to geography. For example, in markets where resources such as telemarketers are plentiful – the bar for a Marketing Qualified Lead is often set lower than the smaller markets who are less well resourced.

So all this is about your #3. There is plenty for EMEA peeps to do to make MA work in Europe. A lot of EMEA sales people have yet to be sold on the benefits -that’s the biggest job for Marketing